Privacy Policy

The two groups of people in this policy

Customers are the people who sign up and use PingLocal: local businesses, the agencies that serve them, and the team members they invite.

People we find are the ones our customers' searches surface: someone who posted publicly asking for a service, someone who complained in public about a local business, or someone who visited a customer's website.

We are the data controller for customer data. For people we find, we act as a processor on our customer's instructions, and the customer is the controller.

The single most important thing to know about the second group: we never send them messages, ever. Not an email, not a text, not a call, not a newsletter. It is the product's core promise and it is enforced in our build pipeline. PingLocal can draft a reply for a customer to read and edit, but the customer decides whether to send it, from their own tools. We never ask for permission to send from a customer's mailbox.

What we collect about customers

• Account details. Your name, email address and the client accounts you belong to. Sign-in is handled by Clerk; we never see or store your password. If you sign in with Google, Clerk receives your name, email address and profile picture from Google, and they are used only to sign you in.
• Purchase details. The plan you bought, the email address you bought it with, and JVZoo's record of the purchase. JVZoo takes the payment; your card and bank details never reach us.
• Your business profile. What you tell us when you set up: your type of business, your services, the towns you serve and your competitors. If you ask us to, we read the public pages of your website to draft this for you, and you check it before anything is saved.
• What you connected, such as Google Sheets, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Slack or Calendly, and the access tokens for them. Those tokens are encrypted before they are written down.
• Agency details. If you are an agency: the clients you add, the email address you give us for a client's monthly report, and any payment link you save for a client.
• How you used the product, which leads you accepted or rejected, when searches ran, what they cost us. The accept and reject decisions are also what train your scoring.
• Ordinary technical logs, request times, errors and the like.

What we collect about people we find

Public posts. Posts, comments and reviews that anybody can read without logging in, on public social networks and forums such as Bluesky and X, and official public registers of newly formed businesses, such as Companies House in the UK and the filings some US states and cities publish. We keep the quote, a working link back to it, who wrote it, when, and what our model made of it.

The customer's own website. A customer can install our website snippet, which records visits to their pages. PingLocal does not try to identify who an anonymous visitor is. If the customer switches it on, the snippet also reads the name, email address and phone number a visitor types into the customer's own form when they submit it, and no other field. A browser that sends the Global Privacy Control signal sends us nothing.

Contact details. We also try to find an email address for a person we find, and we stop at the first answer. In order: an address they published in the post itself, then their public profile, then a match from Apollo where a real name is known, then a guess built from their company's address format. A guessed address is never shown to anybody unless ZeroBounce confirms the mailbox accepts mail. People who post on X stop at the first two steps, because matching an X account to a person off X is not something its users agreed to.

Local business listings. Agencies can search open lists of local businesses, such as Foursquare Open Source Places and OpenStreetMap, to find businesses to offer their services to. These are published business listings: names, addresses, phone numbers and websites.

How long we keep it

A public post is only useful while it is recent, so we apply an age limit per search type and discard anything older:

• Someone asking for a service: 14 days
• Complaints about a competitor: 30 days
• Repeat visits to a customer's website: 30 days
• New businesses and people who have just moved: 60 days

A post that became one of a customer's leads is kept with that lead while the customer's account is open.

Customer account data is kept while the account is open and deleted afterwards on request. Website sessions recorded by the snippet are deleted after six months.

If you describe your business by voice when setting up, the recording is sent to OpenAI to be turned into text and is not kept by us or used for anything else. You see the text and can change it before anything is saved.

Who else processes it

We use a small number of companies to run PingLocal on our behalf:

• Render: hosting and data storage
• Clerk: sign-in
• JVZoo: selling plans and taking payments
• Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter: AI processing, including turning a spoken description into text
• Apollo: company information
• ZeroBounce: email address verification
• Resend: sending our emails to customers
• Upstash: background task scheduling

We will update this list when a company is added or removed.

Separately, a customer can connect their own Google Sheets, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Slack or Calendly account. Those are the customer's own tools and their own choice; we push leads into them and, where the tool allows, read outcomes back. Calendar permissions are requested read-only. They are not our sub-processors, because we are not the ones processing anything there.

The model providers deserve one extra sentence, because it is the question a security reviewer asks: the text of a public post is sent to them to be classified and, where a customer asks for a draft, to be written about. It is treated strictly as data. Nothing a model returns is allowed to choose a destination, a URL or a recipient.

Google user data

What we ask for. When you connect Google Sheets, PingLocal asks Google for one permission, drive.file. It reaches only the files PingLocal itself creates. PingLocal uses it to create one spreadsheet, "PingLocal leads", in your Google Drive, to add a row for each lead you send there, and to read that sheet so the same lead is not added twice. It cannot see or open any other file in your Drive.

How we use it. Only to provide that feature, and, for Google sign-in, only to sign you in. We do not sell Google user data, use it for advertising, or use it to train AI models. Nothing from your Google account is sent to our model providers. No person reads it unless you ask us to for support, it is needed for security, or the law requires it.

Removing access. Disconnect Google Sheets in PingLocal's Destinations screen, or remove PingLocal's access in your Google Account's permissions page. The sheet stays in your Drive, because it is yours.

PingLocal's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Emails we do send

We email customers about their own account: sign-in codes, invitations, lead alerts and notices about their plan.

If an agency asks us to, we email its client a monthly results report. Every one carries a one-click unsubscribe that stops all further reports to that address, and we refuse to send one to an address the account holds as a lead.

We never email the people we find.

Having your data removed

If you are a person we found and you want to be removed, write to us and we will erase you. It is one operation and it covers everything: the posts, the quotes we kept, any leads built from them, your contact details including phone numbers, and any website sessions.

It also adds you to a suppression list, which matters more than the deletion does. Without it the next search would simply find the same public post again and rebuild the same record. The suppression list is keyed so that we can recognise you again without keeping a readable copy of what you asked us to delete.

If you are a customer, you have the usual rights over your own account data: see it, correct it, export it, delete it. Ask and we will do it.

How it is protected

• Every client account's data is isolated at the database level, not only in application code, so a bug in a query cannot return another customer's rows.
• Credentials for connected accounts are encrypted before storage.
• Incoming webhooks, including purchase notices from JVZoo, are signature-verified; we reject anything unsigned.
• Calendar permissions are read-only, and Google Sheets access reaches only the sheet PingLocal creates, by design and not by policy.
• We pay for every source and enrichment call ourselves. Those costs are never passed on to you, and we have no incentive to over-collect.

Contact

Write to help@pinglocal.io for anything on this page: an erasure request, a question about what we hold, or a data processing agreement.

The rest of how PingLocal works is in our Terms of Service.